3rd Floor

Grateful Graduate Project: Reason to be Grateful 8 of 36
The third floor of FNAC’s Montparnasse branch, I found, is a little treasure trove of resources for people learning French as a foreign language.

To my naked eye, it seemed at first a simple bookshop section in a gigantic temple to consumeristic spending but as my understanding of French film, art, literature, increases I am increasingly grateful for the linguistic resources that are expanding my conceptions of life, the world around me, of ‘self’ and of ‘other’. In fact, on the last point, getting to master the language has made the lines between my English speaking ‘self’ and the French ‘other’ blurred. It is becoming clearer that the divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are constructed. Differences in language mask commonalities.

In short, I am grateful for access to resources that inspire one to master new modes of self expression and become more expansive as person. FNAC’s third floor, to me, has become a portal to such interior expansion and for that I am thankful!

Map to FNAC Montparnasse

Grateful graduate is a personal pledge to collect 365 reasons to be grateful for the graduate student experience offered by Paris and London over 2013.